Today's digital printers and MFP's have the ability to accept one or more print jobs which may be queued into an internal print queue in the print output device. These may be printing, copying, scanning or facsimile jobs, and the jobs may come from a directly-connected computer, over a local area network, or over some other form of communications network, such as the Internet, or over conventional telephone lines. In devices which have limited memory, several conditions exist which can lead to jobs blocking one another, as they compete for available memory in the print output device. One condition occurs when a print job is being processed, e.g., rasterized, and stored to memory, or to an internal print queue, at the same time a copy job is being scanned and stored to memory or to an internal print queue. The available memory may be exhausted before either job has been fully stored, hence the jobs are blocked and neither can be physically output. A second condition occurs when memory is used for personal identification number (PIN) encoded print jobs which are processed and stored, and which require that the user come to the device and release the job for physical output by entering the appropriate PIN number. In this case, there may not be sufficient memory to accommodate processing of other jobs.
This invention provides a means of removing one or more blocking jobs from the print output device internal print queue and storing them onto a network server or PC temporarily so that other jobs may be processed. These jobs may then returned to the device queue once the blocking condition has ceased to exist, or when a PIN or other request for the processed print job is entered on the print output device.
In the prior art, this problem has been solved by placing larger memories in the device such as a hard disk.
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